How to Get out of Your Slump: 100 Primal Positions You Can Do at Work

If you have what we call a sedentary job you have probably been hearing about the problem with sitting all day and wondering, what can be done? Standing Desks are helpful but not the whole solution because any ONE position doesn’t work. What works is movement or changing positions. Easy during yoga, but how does one do that while working?

First a little history: When I was in high school in the 1980’s, I realized, three decades before Paleo, that I was paleo. What I mean is, suddenly I felt something was dead in me, and it had to do with, I would not feel the earth or my body or the depths of my being. This was far before the internet, and even computers. I knew something had to change. I found a book in the library that showed how to make moccasins. So my first step into the paleo world was connecting feet to ground. My other steps were to get rid of my bed and furniture. I was tapping into primal instincts. Get rid of everything I can think of to find what is really needed. Or to FEEL something. And stop using cars as much as possible.

Stuck at a desk all day in school, I would go home and find trees to climb. Perched on a limb with a view, I would read books on Native Americans and how they lived. It was more fun to be up in a tree watching the birds and clouds now and then, and dreaming of what is over the horizon and what it was like way back before modern. I was expanding my own horizons in ways that public education was never going to do and preparing myself for a future that no one could know was going to happen.

At the time all I knew was I did not like to sit all day and that it made me feel bad. And I knew shoes also seemed to numb me from feeling something that today I would call life energy and connection to source. And being in a car, that was just more sitting. Something was dawning on me–that people didn’t really know what they were doing. Why drive when you can walk?–was my response to the car crazed society.

So when I recently ran across a blog post by Restorative Exercise Biomechanics and Human Movement instructor Katy Bowman, I was elated!

she published this graphic from a 1955 report of physical anthropology professor Gordon W. Hewes, World Distribution of Certain Postural Habits. :http://www.jstor.org/pss/666393

Katy says, in the post

So, we need to think bigger. There is more than just sitting and standing. Create ten different options of each! If you have a standing work station, stand a few different ways every hour. When you sit, sit a few different ways every hour. Open your mind and open your joints! When you get home, stay out of your chairs and try out a lot of these Worldly Options.

So if you have what we call a sedentary job, it really isn’t the job that is sedentary. It is the way you are performing the job. What happened is, the Modern Sit Down Office is way behind the times. Anything that is done on a computer can be turned into an active and healthy experience.

I have been playing with my use-to-be sedentary environment for years. For this post I have put together a short video that explains the new Movement Friendly Office and how you can get more juice out of every minute of your day. Never waste a minute again destroying your health. Instead, tweak your environment and learn to interact with it so you are building muscle tone, joint flexibility, alignment and stimulating metabolism all at the same time…and all while you are working.